The invention relates to network communication, and in particular, to network data management.
The value chain concept described by Michael Porter in 1985 has been utilized as a powerful tool to analyze value-adding activities in an organization, such as a company. To maximize value creation while minimizing costs, the interrelated value-adding activities must collaborate well. FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of value chains in a semiconductor foundry. Entities therein maintain different data and collaborate to form value chains.
For example, product data master (PDM) 192 communicates with manufacturing execution system (MES) 191 to maintain new product data. Customer data master (CDM) 194 maintains new customer data. Price quotation master (PQA) 196 generates price quotations based on product and customer data respectively stored on PDM 192 and CDM 194. Order manager (OM) 193 maintains order data associated with customer data. Order price checker (OPC) 195 calculates profit margins from order data and price quotations. Thus, data processed by respective entities has dependency (denoted by arrows therebetween in FIG. 1), bringing a synchronization issue.
Communication between the entities is typically implemented by periodically transmitting data snapshots from one entity to another in a batch mode. This is not only time consuming, but also detrimental to data integrity. Additionally, when an entity transmits a data snapshot, other entities receive and extract the content thereof according to the format in which the data snapshot is composed. If the format is changed, all of the other entities must change their extraction processes accordingly.